


i bear little resemblance to the king i once was

by harukatenoh



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Gen, Post Ptolemy's Gate, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 01:50:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8184502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harukatenoh/pseuds/harukatenoh
Summary: Kitty deals with the memory of somebody she didn't know.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this goes out to zeena who has been bugging me for a bartimaeus fic for about 4 years. i still cry everytime i think about this series. im sorry if there are mistakes i havent checked this through (do i ever lol) and i havent written in past tense for MONTHS
> 
> work title is from east by sleeping at last which i listened to on repeat while writing this

There was a statue. It stood directly outside her apartment - why she chose this place, of all the places, she will never know - and sometimes if the light hit it right, the minerals in the rock turned it alight, sparkling with the promise of power. She saw it every day, there was no avoiding it. 

Sometimes she wondered if it’s really him haunting her, or her not being able to let go.

_Let go of what?_ _Did I ever have anything to hold onto?_

Every morning when she woke up and threw open her curtains, a statement to the world, announcing  _ I’m still here, against the odds _ , he stood there to greet her.

She hated it. Or maybe she didn’t hate it. Maybe she felt nothing for the statue and everything for the person it represented. 

Maybe she felt nothing for the person it represented either. Maybe it was all about the memory, the memory of a time where things were dynamic and change was tangible in her hands and she wasn’t stuck like this. Stationary. Static. Suffocated. 

Jakob called her the other day. She stood in the square, looking up at the statue as her phone rung. The conversation held the same strained familiarity that she felt everywhere, the unsettling and comforting presence of a better time long gone. Standing in the shadow of that statue while talking to Jakob only heightened the cold nostalgia - both of them memoirs of her past. 

Not that she would compare them any more after that. The thought almost makes her laugh. To compare Jakob to the person this statue tried to be would be her biggest mistake to date, even considering her track history. Jakob was better. Far, far better.

And even though she was aware that Jakob was better, that nearly anybody on this damned planet was better and she should be putting her longing towards better people, there was a part of her that still desperately wished that this statue could be more than memory and stone. There was a part of her that wished it was flesh and bone.

There was a part of her that wished he could come back to prove her wrong. Prove that he was better. Prove that she was right in wishing and cursing and hating and believing. 

But the world she lived in now was one where the dead stay dead and spirits stay away, even if ghosts didn’t. Even if the skeleton in her closet took form in a glittering statue in front of her house.

It didn’t even look like him.

Nobody dared to take up the name John Mandrake since. She doubted that anybody ever would again. Most people hadn’t even known what had happened at first, whether the spirit had simply self destructed or whether some lucky magician had managed to get the final blow. But they had pieced together the puzzle, no help from her required. Not that she would’ve given it. She would’ve preferred it if his memory had stayed dead and buried.

The story had spread and he had been hailed a hero, a true champion to the end and etched into every history book. She went out to the first memorial in his honour they had unveiled, appropriately tacky and glamorous and overdone. Confetti was thrown during the ceremony and people made long speeches that some poor schoolchildren would be forced to study in the future and she hated it all vehemently, but still stayed til the end, til she could place a bouquet of flowers at the base.  All the while she wondered - if he had been here, would he have enjoyed this?

She didn’t know. Maybe he would enjoy more the undercurrents in the city that whispered his name, the store-vendors and their customers, the children in their playgrounds, the stray magicians and their colleagues. Would he have sneered at the graffiti that lined the walls of the rebuilt Glass Palace honouring him or reveled in it? Would he have shunned the children who ran the streets singing about his feats?

Night had already fallen when she left work that night and biked back home, arriving in front of her apartment wearily. Barely lit by the streetlights nearby, the statue loomed over her more tonight. The plaque was constantly backlit so she could easily read the letters printed on it just like she had read them every time she passed the damn thing.

But there was something different about it tonight. Tonight she was more tired than usual and colder than usual and angrier than usual. Tonight the statue looked like who it should look like, shrouded in darkness and shining with a light from within itself.

Tonight the name on the plaque was wrong, because that statue was not John Mandrake. 

She walked over to it and dropped to her knees, pulling out a pocket knife. In the rock above the plaque, on the base of the statue, she pushed her knife into the stone as hard as she could and carved out, in large and angry letters -  _ Nathaniel.  _


End file.
